Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday April 27, 2015 @08:05AM
from the they-took-our-jobs dept.

HughPickens.com writes: Ilan Brat reports at the WSJ that technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the backbreaking job of gently plucking ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, just as the shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive. "It's no longer a problem of how much does a strawberry harvester cost," says Juan Bravo, inventor of Agrobot, the picking machine. "Now it's about how much does it cost to leave a field unpicked, and that's a lot more expensive." The Agrobot costs about $100,000 and Bravo has a second, larger prototype in development. Other devices similarly are starting to assume delicate tasks in different parts of the fresh-produce industry, from planting vegetable seedlings to harvesting lettuce to transplanting roses. While farmers of corn and other commodity crops replaced most of their workers decades ago with giant combines, growers of produce and plants have largely stuck with human pickers—partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves. With workers in short supply, "the only way to get more out of the sunshine we have is to elevate the technology," says Soren Bjorn.

While structural unemployment is a progressive circumstance that will hurt a lot of people very badly if it isn't handled properly I do hope these robots are good enough and cheap enough to replace human labor. Technological unemployment is a first world problem if anything is. That said, when someone says an American won't do the job what they mean is, "I'm not willing to pay a living wage for this job"

If we don't define the terms properly we'll end up with solutions that don't fit the problems.

The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.

But when you consider that the people who used to pick fruit are now working in factories sticking consumer goods in boxes, you have to consider our society's priorities pretty messed up. Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?

Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?

The price of a commodity has little to do with "importance", but with scarcity and cost of production. Air is the most important commodity, yet it is free. Water is the second most important, yet it is extremely cheap (as a residential consumer in California I get about 5 gallons for a penny).

you have to consider our society's priorities pretty messed up.

Do you believe that air is free because of messed up social priorities?

Aside from water and air, there is nothing as important to human life as food. Why does worker reward not reflect this?

The price of a commodity has little to do with "importance", but with scarcity and cost of production.

But here we're talking about food for which there is demand and a market, and it's going unpicked due to difficulties in attracting workers. The demand for food has not decreased in recent years, so someone, somewhere, needs that food. And yet it's not "cost-effective" to pick it.

The missing part of this equation is how that "hole" in the supply is fulfilled. And the answer is... cheap imports. Not a problem, you say? It is for the world's poor, because while the global food market means low prices in first world countries, it means high prices in developing countries and leaves people unable to afford to feed their families.

This is where our priorities are messed up. We shrug our shoulders, say "market forces" and let other people shoulder the burden. Just look at the problems that US corn ethanol caused for Mexicans. To people in the States, Mexican maize is cheap, so the ethanol manufacturers snatched it up, leaving the Mexican supply far below demand, pushing prices up and causing widespread hunger.

Don't trust the invisible hand -- everything the hand gives you, it has taken from someone else.

And then what?Force the "third world" to eat overpriced (for their wallets) strawberries while you don't get yours cause they are still rotting on the vine in the fields?

Strawberries are more perishable than corn.Also, you can't pick them all at once with a huge, field-leveling machine. Too gentle for that.Nor can you store them like corn. Nor can you turn them into HFCS or feed livestock with them.And it is literally a backbreaking job to pick them.

The argument is along the lines of the fact that smoking, obesity, etc. have a direct cost to society. From lost productivity to higher healthcare costs, unhealthy lifestyle choices do have a real cost to others who share the planet.

What is puzzling you is called the paradox of value [wikipedia.org]. It can be described as the apparent paradox that water is necessary to life, while diamonds are not, but diamonds are much more expensive than water. The answer is that decisions to buy and sell are made at the margin, so the question isn't "How valuable is water to you?" but rather, "How valuable is the next gallon of water to you?" Since, in "our society", we have enough water to support life and agriculture, the marginal gallon of water is used, say, to water golf courses and wash cars. These low-value marginal uses means that the price of water is low, as is actually seen.

Similarly, with the average American's BMI pushing 30, the marginal value of the next strawberry isn't very big to the vast majority of Americans. So the price of strawberries is low, and there is little room to pay strawberry pickers a good wage. Also see Worth: Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important. [despair.com]

Or more to the point, to compete with strawberries grown in other countries under whatever conditions they deem acceptable.

I've long supported the concept of a VAT-equivalent for pollution (PAT = Pollution Added Tax), where goods are taxed at fixed rates for different pollutants embodied by each manufacturing step, goods leaving the PAT zone are rebated, and goods entering the PAT zone are taxed based on an estimate of their embodied pollution, similar to how VAT works with value changes / rebates / taxes. VAT serves as a way to tax goods without unfairly harming the competitiveness of your products and favoring imported goods, and PAT could extend that logic to pollution controls. But maybe PAT isn't enough. Maybe we also need a HRAT, a "Human Rights Added Tax", which imposes extra fees based on things like human rights abuses, poverty wages, etc embodied in the production of a product, to provide a level playing field for countries with higher standards.

One would have to handle things relatively, of course - a poverty wage in southern California is not the same as a poverty wage in Nigeria, for example, and you don't want to make international sales prohibitive for poor countries simply because their per-capita GDP isn't sufficient. But I'd find it fair to add extra costs at the dock for products produced by factories with inhumane working and living conditions, etc, which keep workers trapped in such conditions by all sorts of means (threats of deportation, threats of violence, unpayable "company store"-type debts, etc). So a strawberry farm in Nigeria paying its workers $2,50 an hour wouldn't be seen as abusive (like one in California would) since that's over double the average national wage and easily meets local cost of living expenses - but a Nigerian farm that left its workers exposed to toxic doses of pesticides and threatened to seize everything their workers own if they try to quit would be seen as abusive even if the nominal salary was $2,50 an hour.

Or more to the point, to compete with strawberries grown in other countries under whatever conditions they deem acceptable.

You can't get strawberries from much further away than Mexico, and even those are inferior to fruit from within the country. Strawberries don't ship well. Most Mexican strawberries never ripen, some of 'em get kinda close but if you know what the real thing is like (I grew up in Santa Cruz) then you know they're crap.

You can get frozen strawberries from further away, but that's expensive too.

This is an idea that I'm surprised hasn't gained more traction. Using import tarrifs as a means of protectionism is quite rightly considered bad form internationally. However, using import tarrifs to create a level playing field seems perfectly fair. After all, if companies in your country are mandated by law to pay a minimum wage, paid holidays and parental leave, and are forced to respect workers rights and health and safety, the countries without minimum wages or paid leave and where nobody bats an eyeli

People say the average worker isn't making as much as they used to, but I think that people are just buying a lot more stuff than they used to. Strawberries are a great example. They used to be something you would buy once in a while. We buy them pretty much every week when they are in season, and I don't think of myself as that well off. Cellular phones, cable TV, Internet, and computers. None of this stuff existed 50 years ago. Our budgets may be stretched, but a lot of it is because of the things we h

50 years ago you didn't need a cellphone or a personal computer. Life would be very difficult without a PC today and likewise for a cellphone. If you are old like me you will remember the ubiquitous payphone, and you will also remember paper-and-phone-driven processes that no longer exist because things are handled more efficiently using computers-and-Internet.

But it's true that very few *need* Cable TV, Netflix, or the latest smartphone.

I think the hard part is for people to make the switch themselves within the context of society. A lot of the homework my kids have to do requires the use of a computer. A single computer for the entire house isn't enough anymore. Now we need a computer for each kid. Same goes for a cell phone. If you don't have a cell phone, you'll be left out of a lot of things simply because people couldn't reach you. Then again, you could probably get by with a $50-$100 phone on a pay per minute plan, and spend a lo

It's easy to talk about material goods as being "unnecessary" especially if they do not contribute to one's physical safety or health, like shelter, food and water.

For better or for worse, though, we are a consumer society and some things almost start to seem to become needs not because they contribute to our physical safety or health but because they contribute to our ability to integrate socially.

You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one. You will not be able to participate in group dynamics or posses the same social information as other people.

The same thing could be said (more tentatively, because there are other outlets) about Netflix. If you're not able to engage with people socially because you are unaware of the types of programs they consume and cannot participate in discussions about them you are also hindered in group dynamics.

Outside the electronics/media sphere, you can make similar judgements about clothes. You don't "need" clothes that fit a specific fashion or brand paradigm -- you can buy used clothes or dollar store clothes and meet the minimal functional needs for clothing. But style and manner of dress is very important for engaging in peer groups, and like it or not people are in/excluded or find it easier or harder to engage in social activities if their mode of dress is compatible with their peer groups.

Now it's easy to make a lot of value judgements -- especially about social networking (the companies, phenomenon, etc) -- but their existence, usage and impact on social life is a reality and at some point I think some of these things become needs for reasonable social integration. Excluding them because they don't meet some minimalist description of "need" starts to sound myopic and mean spirited because I don't know anyone who just lives based on minimal need.

You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks

See, here you're confusing two very different things. A shitty low end Android will let you access Facebook. The iPhone 6 will let you hang with the rich kids. Rich kids have expensive habits. Rich kids often have expensive habits to show off that they're rich. Our little fishing boat doesn't fit very well in a yacht club, am I now poor because I can't "fit in" with the millionaires? Sorry, but wanting to pose in an economic league you're not doesn't strike me as any genuine poverty. At least not severe eno

People say the average worker isn't making as much as they used to, but I think that people are just buying a lot more stuff than they used to.

That's a statement of median salary vs. GDP, which is only tangentially related to spending (i.e., only in the sense that consumer spending affects GDP). And wages and salaries really have been falling relative to GDP [wikimedia.org] over the past 50 years.

Cellular phones, cable TV, Internet, and computers. None of this stuff existed 50 years ago. Our budgets may be stretched, but a lot of it is because of the things we have decided are necessary.

On the flip side, there are a lot of things that are cheaper today than they were 50 years ago, such as clothing and food (according to this article [theatlantic.com], those two expenses went from about 42% of the average household budget in 1950 to about 17% in 2003).

Also, yes, we do buy more than we used to buy. That is called keeping the economy running, and if we weren't buying all those gadgets and trinkets and things *you* don't think are necessary our economy would be in even worse shape. As for the credit card debt, if wages were at least keeping even with what they have historically been people wouldn't have to fall back on so much credit debt now would they.

So what happens when credit cards are all maxed out and people have to lower their spending? Why compani

I am from a farming family (in the UK). And here are some important things to learn:

1) Huge landowning farmers are rich. On top of being rich, they get a lot of subsidies. They get the subsidies because, being rich, they can bribe politicians. This makes them richer, and more able to bribe. The EU is something I support entirely in principle, because trade is better than war, but in few areas has become more corrupt than subsidising landowners;

2) Smaller farmers struggle. You know why they struggle? Because there are about half a dozen highly profitable supermarkets which have nearly all the negotiating power in deciding the prices of goods they buy. The larger farmers are fine with this, producing the least tasty foods in the worst possible conditions (in the case of animals), because they can make profit on volume, and supermarkets can hit the consumer with a huge markup, behave wastefully (it is ridiculous. how much emphasis is put on appearance of fruit and vegetables, for example, and consumers have been engineered into believing this will have an effect on the taste/quality), and still make a massive profit;

3) The larger concerns would have no problem paying their workers more, but then they would make less profit;

4) The smaller concerns tend to be more enthusiastic about the taste and (for animals) the welfare of their product, but they cannot pay their workers more because of 2).

Unfortunately, smaller farmers are really bad at working cooperatively - the NFU is one of the most conservative unions, and dominated by 1). They could have taken up the opportunity to set up home food delivery networks, but this completely passed them by. So this business has now become associated with overpriced "organic" flim-flammers like Riverford and Abel&Cole, the mainstay of GROLIES and other dullards who have more money than sense, rather than mainstream consumers of food (i.e. almost everyone).

The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.

In Greece we grow strawberries, with most of the production exported to northern Europe. Northern Europe eats strawberries because to grow strawberries at a price people will pay you need low wages (or robots!) - despite Greece's huge (25%) unemployment, no Greek is working in the fields as a strawberries picker (that's the hard labour), so we must employ (paying -illegaly- low wages) all those illegal immigrants (they are illegal, and it's important to note that because it's important for the point i try to make - AND because they are illegal...) invading Greece/Europe seeking higher wages than those they earn in their places of origin (but are satisfied with lower wages than those legal in Greece/Europe - so, by both being illegal immigrants and illegal worker, they steal the ability of legal workers, some of them legal immigrants by the way, to buy strawberries).

I don't try to blame only the illegal immigrants (our Greek producers that illegaly employ them are also to blame), just to claim that this problem is much more complicated than just "sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries", and the choises you present must include other factors - some of them quite embarrassing for the usual left-wing person that wants both "open borders" and "wage equality" (those problematic situations -together with the cultural problems Muslim, legal or illegal, immigrants create- contributes to the nationalist rise in Europe).

The rise in nationalism is more to do with sloppy, lazy logic like yours than any inherent qualities of specific immigrants. It's easier to point the finger of blame at conspicuous immigrants than it is to admit you might be part of the problem. I don't want to Godwin, so I won't draw any comparisons, regardless of how chillingly accurate they are.

Not really, if the labor shortage lasted a while then strawberry prices would rise (and demand fall) until the labor was affordable at whatever rate was necessary to attract workers. That's the beauty of the free market, it adjusts automatically. Now, that might mean no one but rich people can afford strawberries, which is a whole different sort of problem and one not solved by the free market.

California rice has a lot of arsenic in it. They should just stop for that reason alone.

Wrong state. The arsenic problem is in former cotton fields, where arsenic was used as a pesticide to kill the boll weevil. This was OK for a non-food crop, but not great for food crops, particularly rice, which has a marked tendency to pick up arsenic from the soil wherever it's present.

Gee i wonder how was it possible to sell strawberries decades and centuries ago without all the machinery and electronics.

Well, first of all, eating strawberries is a luxury that wasn't available in most places of the world just a couple of generations ago. Along with modern genetics you also need fast transportation and refrigeration.

No doubt they don't pay much, but even migrant labor needs some jobs to migrate to. Seasonal employment just doesn't work when there isn't work within a thousand miles during some seasons. Arranging long distance transportation and lodging for families every couple of months is a serious challenge, particularly when migrant labor is used as cover for smuggling of people and contraband.

That said, when someone says an American won't do the job what they mean is, "I'm not willing to pay a living wage for this job"

It's not a matter of not being willing to pay higher wages. The economics of the industry are such that it is impossible to pay substantially higher wages. Profit margins in farming are low in the best of times and labor cost is a very substantial percent of the cost of most agriculture products. Higher wages in crop picking does not result in meaningfully higher productivity. A person has a physical limit on how much work they can accomplish in a given amount of time. Higher wages will not result in

The problem is that the underlying assumptions we have about labor and its value are becoming increasingly outdated. For pretty much the entirety of human history, productivity has depended on human labor, and thus, human labor had specific value, even if unskilled. Even as we added animals and machines, you needed a human to lead/operate/drive them. The difference now is that we increasingly don't need those people any more, because the machines drive themselves. The production is no longer done by humans, it's done by robots, and as such the basic value of unskilled human labor is falling, and in a perfectly efficient market, is not enough to support that laborer.

This is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse. The pool of jobs available for people who can't somehow retrain into an advanced skill is going to shrink, and it's going to keep shrinking, regardless of whether that's fast or slow. Right now we've been propping up the old system with a measure of economic interventions - both by subsidizing the value of labor via social safety net programs, and by setting price floors via minimum wage laws. In the long run, it's not going to remain a viable solution.

What we'll eventually need to do is something like a guaranteed basic income, where everyone is given enough money for basic living expenses. You'd then be free to earn additional (disposable) income on top of that by working. This keeps people from starving and rioting, but it also preserves the market functionality of the economy, because people still have money to buy the goods the robots produce.

How do you pay for this? For one, change from taxing human labor, i.e. income, and instead tax the new source of production - robots. You could also get rid of all the other social safety net programs, because they're now redundant (and probably less efficient), and get rid of the minimum wage as it's no longer needed. When no one is forced to work to survive, markets can be allowed to freely set the price of labor, however low.

It's not just a matter of "paying a living wage", it has to be a wage high enough to lure people out of the city to do the job, into the unknown countryside.

That, and city kids will take time to adjust to the physically demanding work, so they won't be as productive at first, either, and trying to force things will result in even more injuries than normal (farm work is already some of the most dangerous out there).

So the farmers would end up stuck paying more for less, the workers would be stressed and unha

Strawberries are typically grown as annuals. I live in Florida and we have many acres of abandoned orange groves still producing oranges with zero input from anyone. It is simply too expensive to pick them and bring them to market. Nobody will pay that much for an orange. It's interesting because every once in a while when OJ prices spike due to a bad harvest somewhere you will see people show up at these groves and clean them out. But typically they just fall off the tree and rot.

Yea, I find it a little funny (in a sad, depressing, sort of way). We have a short memory as a country/culture. Most people today don't realize that these are the exact same arguments slave owners used to use to justify the continuance of slavery (and, almost certainly, then used to justify the sharecropping system after slavery was ended). Instead of "I can't find American's to do the job", they used to argue "I won't be able to find a white person to do the job". It's all complete bullshit.

they've been able to keep wages, and the minimum wage, depressed so long that the labor force is shrinking not through a lack of potential workers, but through a lack of willingness for people to work for unlivable wages. if wages kept pace with productivity, as they had for the longest time, the median wage would about 140k/yr, and the minimum wage would be ~20/hr.

this has the effect of preserving the elite's status without requiring them to provide for a strong middle class to buy their products.instead they preserve their relative status by keeping everyone else's financial status depressed.

i always thought it would make a great conspiracy dystopian story where the superrich, with everything automated, don't need us anymore so they simply kill us all off the earth reduced to 700,000 souls from 7,000,000,000 in a matter of days (some sort of highly infectious agent?)

if a disease can spread because it can find enough vectors since not enough vaccinate, you are also giving the disease time and space to tinker, and perhaps evolve a new strain that existing vaccines don't protect against

so: yup. but that's less superrich killing and more superstupid killing us

And I say the above as an opinion. I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?

You are incorrect. If the business paid higher wages, they would have to raise the price of strawberries to cover the cost. Then consumers wouldn't buy the strawberries, and would buy something less labor intensive instead, like watermelons. Then the business would fire the strawberry pickers, and switch to growing watermelons.

Unfortunately, most farmers or anyone else that produces a commodity do not have that much control over what they can sell the product for. Sure if the farmer sells directly to people at markets or any other venue, they can raise the price as they see fit. However, most do not have that option. Given that strawberries are perishable items that can't be stored for long, they don't have as much flexibility as grain farmers who can store the crop and wait for prices to go up. Instead, if growing strawberri

The core problem is that technology is reducing the market value of unskilled/low-skilled human labor below the level that someone can survive on. This is an inevitable consequence of automation, and it's one we're not really prepared mentally to handle, because it goes against all of our core assumptions. After all, human labor has been the core element of production since the dawn of history. We're primed to think that if you're willing to work hard, you should not just survive but get ahead, and that's n

I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?

Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.

You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.

If only your "Exhibit A" wasn't mostly selective golden memory tinted by rose colored glasses. The "great uplift" was indeed (mostly) great - if you were a white collar worker in the city, or an industrial worker with a union. For the laborers down on the farm, the topic of discussion, not so much.

And even then the "great uplift" wasn't powered by smaller profit margins or worker's rights - it was powered by rising salaries, employment, and consumer spending. (Emphasis on the last.) It couldn't last,

we don't have the unlimited labor supply we once did = we don't have an unlimited amount of "slave labor"

Immigrant labor is even "better" than literal slave labor because it is cheaper. You don't have to care for your employees. If they get sick or die or whatever, that's not your problem because you don't own them. And if you don't want to pay them, you just inform the INS that you have "discovered" that you have a high number of illegal employees, and would they please come pick them up, perhaps right before or even on payday?

Mexico is not so poor anymore. Its per capita income is similar to some European countries (like Bulgaria), and higher than that in the border regions with the US. Combined with the stagnant US economy, this means fewer Mexicans want to work in the US than in the past.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]

and clothes, electronics, etc, etc. Fuel is much more expensive (ex: gasoline was about $3.80/gallon in Jan) except at cities on the border which are closer to US prices. On top of that, there is a 16.5% tax included in the price of most consumer goods. Because of that, lots of people used to travel to the US to buy clothes, school supplies, and other items for "back to school" time or Christmas. Given the rise in the USD:MXN exchange rate, that's not as attractive any more especially when factoring the

We hit peak Mexican in 2008. Since then, the net flow has been negative (more people returning to Mexico than arriving). The Latino population is still growing because of a higher birthrate, but at that point they aren't "Mexicans", but native-born American citizens.

More people are moving to Mexico from the US than the other way around since it is easier for them to find jobs at home than it is here. It has been that way for the last few years since the recession.

People will grow out of the 9-5 slave-aholic mindset sooner or later I guess.

Well, most of us have moved on to the 8-5 shift with sporadic overtime some while back. Additionally, I'll be happy to give it up as soon as there is an alternative that doesn't involve being starving and homeless.

1. Unlimited under or unemployed illegal aliens that can't find work.2. Said illegal aliens need welfare.3. Middle class being drained via taxation to pay for said welfare.4 Talk of Illegal aliens being granted amnesty so they can vote in 2016. They will vote for "benefits".

Welcome to the new American feudal system. Only a matter of time before titles come back in vogue. Who will be your Lord?

You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems. It's amazing how people will assert something as true that can be debunked with five seconds of Google searching.

You're an idiot. The middle class isn't being drained via taxation. Taxes are lower right now than at any point in the last century. It's the stagnation of wages that's causing the middle class to have problems.

It really doesn't matter what the absolute number of dollars people are paying in taxes might be if the taxation breaks the camel's back. Who do you think is paying for Obamacare?

The greater danger to America is pathetic nonsense like yours. Your sig is fantastically hilarious in this context. I'm sure you think you're doing the right thing, but you just haven't put the leg-work in to figure out your current path is pure nonsense - lazy, lazy thinking.

This is not about 'bleeding-heart socialism', but about why it is a good idea to maintain a balanced society, where the gap between the richest and the poorest is not too big. People only leave their home country with the culture and climate they grew up to love, when the situation becomes bad enough to make the alternatives look significantly be

Look, it isn't just me saying this - it has been measured over the last 4 decades. Follow the link I provided and read about it - this guy isn't a wild-eyed prophet, but a down to earth guy who has done the foot-work. He's not asking anybody to accept it on faith, there is good data to back it up. We can all read it and make up own minds.

Years ago I picked blueberries and apples in Maine, cherries in NY and pecans in Arizona. It's always the same story. The farmers want low-paid slaves. They go to great lengths to discourage local workers so that they can get foreigners who can be exploited.

An apple farmer I dealt with would shout, threaten and demand that people could easily carry a 24' wood ladder vertically, with no practice. When he'd scared away the locals he'd go to the state labor board and say, "See? Americans won't do this work. I need a planeload of Jamaicans." The Jamaicans could all be housed in one big building and were not allowed off the property unescorted, by law. They were essentially incarcerated servants.

Though the picking in New England was still better paid than the picking in Arizona and S. California because the supply of desperate, illegal Mexicans was virtually unlimited in the Southwest.

The H1-B visa situation in the tech industry must surely be similar. For tech employers to say they can't find Americans for the jobs is a ludicrous lie. In any other industry if an employer said "Americans won't or can't do it" the natural answer would be that the employer is simply not willing to pay a fair wage.

The issue here is not labor. It's factory farming done by giant corporations whose R&D focuses mainly on how to cut corners in order to increase profit.

It is interesting that finally someone built a machine that can harvest a Strawberry. The rest of the article is an example of bovine scat. I've been there. HughPickens.com, I challenge your work. Prove it.

Its the generic excuse when they introduce machines that put people out of work, or introduce lower paid non-union labor, or do something else that drags wages down. I for one, am sick of this pseudo-'leftist' language being used to justify driving down the price of labor, and putting people out of work.

Oregon is a major producer of strawberries in the U.S. Sixty years ago, most of the strawberries here were picked by local youths, as their summer jobs. In the decades that followed, the tradition of kids having manual-labor jobs fell victim to increasing affluence, changing social values, and an influx of migrant workers. A new generation of parents no longer felt it important to teach their kids the work ethic through hard, manual work. Some might argue that, if the strawberries are spoiling in the fields, it started decades ago with the spoiling of our kids.

A new generation of parents no longer felt it important to teach their kids the work ethic through hard, manual work.

Or maybe they felt that having their kids spending their summers slaving in fields for piss poor wages wasn't a good thing anymore. Don't know about you, but if I can find a way for my kids to have a better summer job than that, I will. Hopefully it will be something that will be in the same field they eventually want to work in.

There are worse things than picking berries - I paid for my first year of university by picking pine cones for the MNR to eventually turn into tree seedlings for reforestation. Wou

Picking strawberries is extremely labor intensive, but it still seems like human beings would be better at picking out the good ones without damaging them than robots would. I've always thought swarms of small robots would be more useful for pest control: Seeking out and terminating with extreme prejudice any weeds, bugs, or rodents in the field. This could eliminate the use of herbicide and pesticide, hence no more need for "Roundup Resistant" and other GMO seeds. Grain losses to mice run into double-digit

This is exactly why we need the fucking GOP to get off their GD ass and resolve the fucking illegal issues.
The idea of giving ALL illegals amnesty is a joke. But even worse is the idea of taking kids that have grown up here thinking that they are Americans and sending them to another nation. It absolutely shows no compassion.

What is needed is a compromise in which the good kids are allowed to earn citizenship, the parents of any kids that remained here are allowed to have a 'pink card' ( basically, no c

I hate to break it to you, but the original article stated "The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods, one of the country's largest vegetable farmers, to buy a Spanish startup", and its link to the company website brings up a page that starts off with "Plant Tape is a visionary and innovative company founded in Spain".

The AC responded "So the guys from Mexico will be replace with... hardware from Mexico?"

But TFA was mostly talking about picking machines of unspecified origin. It's amazing how much clearer things become when you spend more time looking for how someone else's comment makes sense than you do looking for the smallest detail to pounce on for chest thumping purposes.

Exactly. People seem to forget that labor is also a market. If people are unwilling to perform the job at a given pay rate, then the rate is then too low and must be adjusted.

For some reason we have allowed the creation of a permanent immigrant underclass in the US and convinced ourselves that no one else here is willing to do the job. Horseshit. No one is willing to do it at the artificially low wage that agribusiness wishes to pay. Supply and demand has been legislated out of the equation and has flipped the labor market upside down.

Exactly. People seem to forget that labor is also a market. If people are unwilling to perform the job at a given pay rate, then the rate is then too low and must be adjusted.
For some reason we have allowed the creation of a permanent immigrant underclass in the US and convinced ourselves that no one else here is willing to do the job. Horseshit. No one is willing to do it at the artificially low wage that agribusiness wishes to pay. Supply and demand has been legislated out of the equation and has flipped the labor market upside down.

Exactly. Employees leave out the "at the wage I want to pay" at the end of their "I can't get people to take this job..." whine. It's no surprise as people get better educated they don't want to do back breaking labor at low wages.

Seems more like a simple supply-and-demand problem to me. Exploitation is easy when you have a huge oversupply of unskilled labor. Cut way back on the labor supply, and wages would rise automatically, with no need to force companies by state fiat to pay employees more than they are worth in a free market. How do you "cut back on the labor supply"? Aye, therein lies the rub...

Child labor laws were different then, and a greater percentage of families lived on small family farms. Huge corporate farms make it possible to amortize the costs of millions of dollars worth of equipment over significant acreage, but they require huge amounts of seasonal labor to function. The only way to keep seasonal labor employed is to have them move with seasonal demand; migrant labor can just as easily come from another country as another state.
Oh, yeah, and 500 years ago, we picked all our own ma